Klaus: As you obviously have profound knowledge on cache matters, maybe you have an opinion on the following as well
My knowledge of CPU architecture and the like is limited to what I read here and there. I have a decent background for understanding most of it, but "expert" knowledge is not something I can claim to posess in this field. There are several on this board who are far more knowledgeble on the subject of cache (and CPU architectures) than I.
I don't have a solid die size for Banias, so I would have to go with the 80mm² or so speculated on this thread. Considering that Opteron's 1MB L2 seems to take up around 81mm² (source: die photo measurement), that would seem very impressive. Recall, however, that Tbred'C' has a die size of 87mm², compared to 101mm² for Barton. Assuming the difference between the two is just the 256kB cache, that results in a cache density of 56mm² per MB. The PIII core was always significantly smaller than the Athlon core, so it's not unreasonable to assume that the cache density of Banias is "only" something like 10-30% higher than Barton's.
-fyo
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
